Meditations on the sacred page and other books

Book 9 closes the narrative portion of Confessions. Because of this, some readers have viewed books 10-13 as merely appendices. Confessions, however, is more than biography, and books 10-13 reveal the depth of Augustine’s thought. This section both recapitulates and progresses.

The opening lines of book 10 reflect book 1. “May I know you, who know me,” and “Power of my soul, enter into it and fit it for yourself” (i.1) connect this book to the quest announced in book 1, that he would know this God that fills the universe yet condescends to dwell in the human soul (1.iv.4-1.v.6). He acknowledges that God knows him, and that revelation is a one-way street: “Indeed, Lord, to your eyes, the abyss of human consciousness is naked. What could be hidden within me, even if I were unwilling to confess it to you? I would be hiding you from myself, not myself from you.” (ii.2)

His discussion of the word confessiones is another tie back to book 1. He acknowledges that the confession is of God’s grace: “When I am evil, making confession to you is simply to be displeased with myself. When I am good, making confession to you is simply to make no claim on my own behalf, for you, Lord, ‘confer blessing on the righteous’ but only after you have first ‘justified the ungodly.’” (ii.2)

Why should Augustine write these confessions? How does he intend to edify others? “Stir up the heart when people read and hear the confessions of my past wickednesses, which you have forgiven and covered up to grant me happiness in yourself, transforming my soul by faith and your sacrament. Prevent their heart from sinking into the sleep of despair and saying ‘It is beyond my power.’ On the contrary, the heart is aroused in the love of your mercy and the sweetness of your grace, by which every weak person is given power, while dependence on grace produces awareness of one’s own weaknesses.” (iii.4)

Yet, book 10 is not a completely new start. In book 9, Augustine learned the secret to a clearer knowledge of God. The story of his mystic experience with his mother in Ostia (9.x.23-25) is not a random memory or a unique moment. It becomes the project for Augustine’s mystical ascent to God in book 10. Here, Augustine is reenacting the ascent and teaching the reader how to join in.

Augustine begins his search by asking, “When I love you, what do I love?” (vi.8). Although physical sensations reverberate the beauty of God, they are not him. Augustine must seek elsewhere. So, he comes to consider himself. “I see in myself a body and a soul, one external, the other internal. Which of these should I have questioned about my God, for whom I had already searched through the physical order of things from earth to heaven, as far as I could send the rays of my eyes as messengers? What is inward is superior. All physical evidence is reported to the mind which presides and judges of the responses of heaven and earth and all things in them, as they say ‘We are not God’ and “He made us’. The inner man knows this—I, I the mind through the sense-perception of my body.” (vi.9) It is clear already that soul or mind is the weightier member of the soul/body pair.

Turning within, Augustine fixates on memory. His reflection on memory may seem excessive to the reader, but it demonstrates the mental concentration involved in the mystical ascent. At the end of the exposition, though, Augustine still has not found God in his memory (xxiv.35). In fact, God is not found in any of the powers of the mind (xxv.36).

The impediment is a moral one. The vision of God is sharpened as the soul is purified from sin (xxvi.37-xxix.42). The soul is hindered by temptation. The first temptation is the lust of the flesh. Here we see Augustine’s ascetic orientation. Sex is allowable for some, but chastity is better (xxx.41). Food should be taken like medicine, not for pleasure (xxxi.44). Now, Augustine is not a dualist. He acknowledges that “all your creation is good,” (xxxi.46) but that doesn’t stop him from embracing it rather fearfully. There does seem to be some tension between his Christian affirmation of creation and his neo-Platonic predilection for the non-sensual.

Augustine continues his account of temptation by showing how each of the five senses, though good, contains snares. Their pleasures can distract the soul from pursuing God. After the senses, Augustine speaks about the lust of the eyes. Surprisingly, he identifies this with curiosity, the striving after vain knowledge. He says this because sight is the primary sense used in acquiring knowledge (xxxv.54). Similar to his attitude toward sensual delights, Augustine derides knowledge for knowledge’s sake. Curiosity presents not opportunities to fulfill the cultural mandate, but an “immense jungle full of traps and dangers” (xxxv.56). The Christian Church would have to wait another millennium before it made a virtue of scientific inquiry.

Finally, Augustine comes to the third temptation, the “ambition of the secular world” (“pride of life” in our King James). “The temptation is to wish to be feared or loved by people for no reason other than the joy derived from such power, which is no joy at all. It is a wretched life, and vanity is repulsive” (xxxvi.59). This is an unavoidable temptation, because if we do good things, we will naturally receive praise from good people. Augustine trusts God’s help, for “in temptations of a different sort I have some capacity for self-exploration, but in this matter almost none” (xxxvii.60).

The reader who has come this far will notice that Augustine has been speaking of these temptations throughout Confessions. James O’Donnell, one of Augustine’s most insightful commentators, suggests that the three forms of temptation are central to the whole of Confessions. Augustine opposes them to three main virtues. “Ambitio saeculi … defeats humility, the virtue of the self as created being, counterpart of God as creator; concupiscentia oculorum seeks illicit knowledge to the detriment of sapientia, the authentic knowledge that marks in us the illumination of the divine Word; and concupiscentia carnis runs amok in love of created things without reference to God and thus destroys the caritas that comes of the Spirit. Thus even in sin, we reflect the image and likeness of God.”

How then can we come to the vision of God? There is a “true Mediator” sent from God (xliii.68). He was God, and added to himself humanity. He died that we might live. “For you will cure all my diseases through him who sits at your right hand and intercedes with you for us. Otherwise I would be in despair. Many and great are those diseases, many and great indeed. But your medicine is still more potent” (xliii.69).